From oil fields to seven figures through forex

From minimum wage to seven figures

Muzamil opens the conversation asking how someone earning a significant sum in Canadian oil fields could reach a seven-figure salary. Raja explains that the journey was not linear. After his wife joined him in Canada in 2015, he left the oil fields, where he had been making $7,000 to $8,000 per month after tax working 91 hours per week. The drop to minimum wage at a car parts factory, earning $2,200 per month, felt like a betrayal. “At one point, I’m making $78,000 a month. Now I’m making $2200 a month,” he says. That gap between what he had earned and what he was earning became the catalyst for looking elsewhere.

The Instagram moment

One day scrolling Instagram, Raja saw 19 to 22-year-olds driving luxury cars. He asked a friend what they were doing. The friend showed him checks: $12,000, $20,000, $9,000, each from just two weeks of work. “I said, what? This is two weeks?” The answer was door-to-door sales. Against everyone’s advice, including his wife’s initial skepticism, Raja pivoted. He would eventually make $120,000 after tax in his first year, and later build a sales office with 20 agents earning around $250,000 in annual turnover.

Discovery of forex and the first loss

The sales money gave Raja downtime, which he filled by trading. In 2016, after seeing Uncle Ted’s Instagram posts showing daily forex profits of $4,000 to $5,000, he opened an IC Markets account with $200 euros and lost it in two weeks. He joined Uncle Ted’s bootcamp for $350, telling himself, “If this is a scam, I know where you live and I’m going to hunt you down.” He made $1,000 in two weeks. But during office downtime, he would overtrade, gambling to recover losses. By the end of 2016, he had lost $80,000 of his savings, then put $150,000 into the Quadriga CX crypto exchange. That exchange collapsed in January 2018, taking the funds. He was now unable to pay his apartment rent.

The unintentional scheme

Desperate, Raja began taking money from friends for trading, promising returns. He made some money, which he gave back. More friends came. The cycle continued until he realized he had built an unintentional Ponzi scheme, managing nearly $500,000 across 20 to 21 people. “When my first son was born, I didn’t want to come in such a life where we are stuck,” he recalls. He told his father the full story. Rather than condemn him, his father helped him devise a repayment plan: divide the debt and offer 24 months to repay. Raja closed his sales business and committed to $16,000 per month in restitution, using his trading and bootcamp income.

COVID and the breakthrough

In 2020, COVID lockdowns shut down in-person bootcamps. Raja pivoted to virtual bootcamps. Four hundred people signed up at $500 each. “From that virtual bootcamp, 400 people signed up. Something like that. $200,000.” He went to the bank, deposited the money, and sent emails to his investors: “You’re paid off in whole.” By then he had moved from $110,000 in his account to $15,000 after the final repayment. But the burden lifted. “When I got that burden off, I sat on the car, I got so many things in my head. That, man, that. It’s over, like, I’m out of the hell.”

Building the ecosystem

With debt cleared and no financial pressure, Raja’s trading improved. He began livestreaming daily, attracting 3,000 viewers. His strategy shifted: with an audience of 3,000, he saw 3,000 potential clients for courses, bootcamps, and trading tools. He designed a keyboard device that mapped forex hotkeys to MetaTrader, hired a 19-year-old programmer from Italy for $200, and expanded into a full product ecosystem. Today, he operates under the Raja Banks brand, which includes live education, bootcamps, and trading platforms.

The mindset of recovery

Throughout the conversation, Muzamil notes that Raja’s impulsive nature, which led him to move to Alberta on $1,200, to marry on a whim, and to enter forex rashly, is the same trait that pushed him through recovery. “When your back is against the wall, you fight,” Raja says. “When you don’t have any option and you know it’s do or die, you have nothing to lose. You find a way somehow.” His willingness to admit failure, rebuild in public, and turn loss into teaching material became the foundation of a seven-figure income that compounds through education and community.